Ralph Wilson, 95, died at his home in Grosse Pointe Shores today, according to the Buffalo Bills, the NFL team he owned.

Grosse Pointe Shores resident Ralph Wilson, who owned the Buffalo Bills since the team’s founding in 1960, died Tuesday at age 95.

A Columbus, Ohio, native, Wilson was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2009 and was the National Football League’s longest-tenured owner.

He died at his Grosse Pointe Shores home, and his death was announced by Bills CEO and President Russ Brandon at the NFL annual owners meeting in Orlando this afternoon.

"This incredible man was the personification of the Buffalo Bills,” Brandon said in a statement. “His life was grit, determination and resolve. He was bigger than life in many ways and yet he was the everyday man, driving his Ford Taurus to the local store and greeting everyone as they called out “Hi Ralph!” He will be greatly missed by those in our community whose lives he touched.”

Wilson is the second local NFL team owner to die this month: Detroit Lions owner William Clay Ford Sr. died of pneumonia at age 88 on March 9. Ownership of the Lions passed to his wife and children.

Wilson previously owned 2.5 percent of the Lions, according to a Buffalo News story in 2009. He founded the Bills in 1959 for $25,000, and at the same time co-founded the American Football League, but said the league lost $1.4 million in its first three years, the Buffalo newspaper reported him as saying.

The AFL proved to eventually be a viable business and merged with the NFL in 1970.

Wilson, who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and later assumed control of his father’s insurance business, never disclosed a succession plan for the Bills, or for Detroit-based Ralph C. Wilson Industries Inc., which includes manufacturing, television and radio stations, construction, insurance and contract drilling operations.

However, it was reported that the team will be sold after his death.

“Mr. Wilson has made it very clear that he is not going to sell the franchise while he’s alive, and once he passes on, the franchise will be sold,” The Buffalo News reported NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell as saying in August 2012.

Wilson and his wife, Mary, had three daughters. One, Linda Bogdan, died in 2009 after a career as the NFL’s first female scout and as an executive with the Bills. Another daughter, Christy Wilson Hofmann, is a team consultant.

The Bills’ home venue, Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y., is named for him. The team won the 1964 and 1965 AFL championships, and lost the Super Bowl four consecutive times from 1990 to 1993.

Wilson used his fortune to keep the struggling AFL afloat in the early 1960s, reportedly going so far as to loan the rival Oakland Raiders $400,000 in 1961.

Wilson was one of just two NFL owners to votes against allowing the Cleveland Browns to abruptly relocate to Baltimore after the 1995 season (the other owner being Pittsburgh’s Dan Rooney).

The Bills today are estimated by Forbes.com to be worth $870 million.

Wilson served on a variety of NFL committees over the years, and was instrumental in negotiating the AFL-NFL merger and later some of the collective bargaining and free agency agreements among the owners and players.

He ceded total control of the Bills to Brandon last year.

“He told me he was passing the torch to me to run the franchise in totality. He has granted me full authority to run the franchise with zero restrictions and zero limitations,” Brandon told ESPN.com in January 2013.

As for the future of the franchise, Brandon said in today’s statement: “Right now all of us are absorbing this tremendous personal loss. We are performing our day-to-day functions as we normally would. We understand our fans’ curiosity in wanting to know what the future holds for our organization and that will be addressed in the near future. But at this time, we are committed to honoring the life and legacy of Ralph C. Wilson, Jr., the man who delivered NFL football to Buffalo.”

Wilson also owned the Grosse Pointe Park-based investment firm Ralph Wilson Equity Fund LLC. That fund was among the original investors in Ardesta LLC, a venture capital company co-founded in 2000 by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. Snyder said Tuesday that Wilson was "a leader in more areas of business" than he could count.

Wilson was born on Oct. 17, 1918. He saw his first NFL game in 1934, when the Lions relocated to Detroit from Portsmouth, Ohio, the Buffalo News reported.

Wilson graduated from the University of Virginia and attended the University of Michigan’s law school before the war. Wilson served as an officer on minesweepers in both the Pacific and Atlantic campaigns during the war, according to his official biography from the Grosse Pointe Farms-based Ralph Wilson Foundation.

His donations funded a number of charities and medical centers, along with the $2.5 million, 10,000-square-foot Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Pro Football Research and Preservation Center at the hall of fame in Canton, Ohio, in 2011.

Wilson broke a hip at his home in 2011 and used a wheelchair and walker in his few subsequent public appearances. The injury forced him to miss a Bills game for the first time, and he attended just a couple of games after that, according to a variety of Buffalo-area and NFL media reports.